About Me

Dr. F., having been driven to sheer unholy madness by the mendacity, folly, and criminality of the Bush Administration, not to mention the uncouth, ungrammatical, and vacuous rhetoric of its principal, has retreated to a better but imaginary world.

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Saturday, March 10, 2012

100 years ago, a pencil sharpener salesman and pulp novel fan decided he could write as well as the people he was reading and wrote the serialized novel A Princess of Mars. Five or six decades later, I fell under the spell of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books and the Mars they depicted. John Carter's Barsoom was a take on Percival Lowell's Mars, rather than the one we know today, a dying planet with canals and vestiges of civilization.

Consequently, I was a bit nervous going to see John Carter, since I was pretty sure they could find lots of ways to mess it up. I was pretty pleased with the result, though, even if Deejah Thoris and her maids insisted on wearing a certain, albeit not too large, amount of clothing, contrary to the naked except for jewelry way I remember them. It was pretty hard to take Carter, devotee of the God of War, as a pacifist, though.

Naturally the fight scenes were shot in the obligatory speeded up motion of contemporary cinema, with the result that they were pretty boring.

I saw it in 2-D, but I suppose it would be good in the 3-D version. For my taste, it was less sappy than Avatar and more fun in the final fights.